Public Money - Public Code: Helping with the campaign
Hello everybody, I just realised that this message was not yet sent here, also it might be interesting for you. The more people help us with that task the better the results will be. Thanks already for your help! Best Regards, Matthias * Erik Albers [2017-08-01 14:09 +0200]: [...] we are preparing a campaign named "Public Money Public Code". The aim of this campaign is to ask all the public authorities in Europe that develop software inhouse or that pay external software development and finance or co-finance the development with public funds, to release the software under a Free Software licence. Along with the other PR-instruments we in particular like to underfed the campaign with data and knowledge about the use / misuse of public fundings for software development. We like to shed light on the best and the worst cases. In order to do so, we need to collect information first. We will then use this information for analysis and publications to highlight the importance about publicly financed software to be published as Free Software. And this is where you come in: We will use Freedom of Information requests to collect information about the status of non-free software used and released by public authorities in local, state and European level. If you do not know what a Freedom of Information request (FOI) is or how to file it, please find more information about it on the campaigns wiki page. https://wiki.fsfe.org/Activities/PMPC If you are interested in getting active for Free Software and to help the FSFE to get this important campaign big, please read this wiki page carefully. It should give you all information necessary. If it misses something or something is unclear, please ask. On the page you will find: - general information about the campaign - general information about FOIs - written drafts for FOIs to use - helpful links for FOIs in specific European countries - Country information pages to collect succesfully filed FOIs to be analysed = How you can contribute = - File in FOIs and document them in the wiki accordingly - help the readers of your country page to understand the campaign in your language and give them orientation to get active -> this way the campaign can spread much better - help to translate the drafts for FOIs in your language and enable people to easily participate - spread this campaign, the idea and how people can contribute in your local group, in your channels, on mailing lists and wherever you see it fits In know it is summer and you might have already your vacation planned. But on the other hand, maybe you have some spare time in your vacation to contribute for Free Software. Or you meet a lot of people during summer events to let them know about the campaign and they again find some time to contribute. Or you wait for autumn to get active : ) Really, there are so many ways to get active in this campaign and every bit counts. Aside from the effects for the furthering of Free Software, IMHO the sexyness of this campaign is that people immediately understand the request even if they do not care about software: that public money should lead into a public good is an easy and understandable request. Happy hacking, Erik -- Matthias Kirschner - President - Free Software Foundation Europe Schönhauser Allee 6/7, 10119 Berlin, Germany | t +49-30-27595290 Registered at Amtsgericht Hamburg, VR 17030 | (fsfe.org/join) Contact (fsfe.org/about/kirschner) - Weblog (k7r.eu/blog.html) ___ Discussion mailing list Discussion@lists.fsfe.org https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion
an FSFE hackathon?
Hi all, Has there ever been an FSFE hackathon? How would people feel about having such an event, or even a few small hackathons in parallel? Are there tasks that would be useful to FSFE and can be completed in one or two days, either by an individual or small teams? Would anybody have ideas about obtaining prizes, t-shirts or other support for hackathon participants? Hackathons can be particularly useful for potential Outreachy and GSoC interns to become familiar with the free software community and also for them to complete small pieces of code that help mentors identify which candidates to shortlist. Regards, Daniel ___ Discussion mailing list Discussion@lists.fsfe.org https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion
FSFE in Outreachy?
Hi all, Has there ever been any discussion about FSFE being a mentoring organization in Outreachy? Are there any projects specific to FSFE that would be suitable for a 12 week internship? Are there any projects that could be done upstream in free software that FSFE depends on? Also, regardless of whether FSFE participates, is there anybody who would like to consider helping to mentor a project under Debian or one of the other organizations? Outreachy is generating a lot of publicity at the moment and being a mentoring organization may also increase awareness of FSFE. Regards, Daniel ___ Discussion mailing list Discussion@lists.fsfe.org https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion
Re: Paper "Security record of open source and free software"
Hi Matthias, On Friday, 2017-08-18 10:51:21 +, Matthias Kirschner wrote: > https://www.esmt.org/sites/default/files/dsi_ipr5_engl-dt.pdf (English > and German) > > Looking forward to your comments. It was pointed out to me by a very attentive reader ;) that the English version has some odd use of "free of licensing". The German sentence " Freie Software zeichnet sich dadurch aus, dass Ihre Verwendung, Analyse, Verbreitung und Verbesserung unabhängig von den konkreten Lizenzmodellen grundsätzlich genehmigungsfrei ist. " was translated to " Free software is characterized by the fact that its use, analysis, distribution, and improvement is, in principle, free of licensing, regardless of the specific licensing models. " Theproblem is "genehmigungsfrei", which can be translated as "free of licensing", but in this context shouldn't, as almost every Free Software *does* come with some license. I think a much better approach would be to use "free of approbation". Eike -- OpenPGP/GnuPG encrypted mail preferred in all private communication. GPG key 0x6A6CD5B765632D3A - 2265 D7F3 A7B0 95CC 3918 630B 6A6C D5B7 6563 2D3A Care about Free Software, support the FSFE https://fsfe.org/support/?erack Use LibreOffice! https://www.libreoffice.org/ signature.asc Description: PGP signature ___ Discussion mailing list Discussion@lists.fsfe.org https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion
Re: Public Money - Public Code: Helping with the campaign
> > * Erik Albers [2017-08-01 14:09 +0200]: > > [...] > > we are preparing a campaign named "Public Money Public Code". The aim of this > campaign is to ask all the public authorities in Europe that develop software > inhouse or that pay external software development and finance or co-finance > the development with public funds, to release the software under a Free > Software licence. > > Along with the other PR-instruments we in particular like to underfed the > campaign with data and knowledge about the use / misuse of public fundings for > software development. We like to shed light on the best and the worst cases. > Hi Erik, Mathias, all, I've been working on a philosophical argument that distinguishes free technologies from proprietary technologies on a technical basis. This offers a foundation to argue, along with the PMPC campaign, that European institutions, and more generally public institutions, should prefer open technical systems to closed technical systems (respectively: free software to privative software) not for ideological reasons, but on technical grounds. Petites Singularités already successfully used that argument to expel a proprietary software company from an European consortium to the benefit of a free software project (ongoing MURIQUI project, see [0]). A first approach of this argument can be found in "Good bye 'open-source'; hello 'free software'" from January 2013, and was discussed abundantly during the last Libre Software Meeting in Saint-Etienne, France, the first week of July (RMLL 2017). I'm preparing a report on this covering interventions of Coline Ferrarato, Stéphane Couture, Thiago Novaes, Natacha Roussel, and Yann Moulier-Boutang. The conversation will continue in the form of articles and hopefully a review on free technologies. I would like to propose that this effort is linked to the PMPC campaign so that when the EU software project coverage is complete, the campaign can evolve and push the technical argument. In a nutshell, French philosopher Gilbert Simondon distinguished open and closed technical systems that promote different ethics and aesthetics: the former embrace diversity, evolution, perennity, and cooperation, while the latter push univocity, control (vendor-lock), specialization. The key argument is that the path taken to produce a technology conditions the resulting technique. This conversation will happen on the Petites Singularités discourse platform [2], and I would like to invite people interested in the PMPC to experiment with this platform as a campaign tool. I wish the FSFE would provide support towards this endeavor: I can provide the platform and sysadmin effort to sustain it (i.e. no FSFE sysadmin will be required), but I can't otherwise spend more time organizing the campaigning effort. What do you think? How can these two approaches (philosophical / technical argument and EU assets identification with FOIA requests) can create synergies to amplify the PMPC campaign? Who would be interested in supporting such an endeavor, and with which means? Thank you for your attention, == hk [0]: https://ps.zoethical.com/t/singular-technologies-the-third-technoscape/333 [1]: https://ps.zoethical.com/t/good-bye-open-source-hello-free-software/344 [2]: https://ps.zoethical.com/ -- hellekin ___ Discussion mailing list Discussion@lists.fsfe.org https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion
Re: Public Money - Public Code: Helping with the campaign
On 25.08.2017 19:59, hellekin wrote: >> * Erik Albers [2017-08-01 14:09 +0200]: >> we are preparing a campaign named "Public Money Public Code". The aim of this >> campaign is to ask all the public authorities in Europe that develop software >> inhouse or that pay external software development and finance or co-finance >> the development with public funds, to release the software under a Free >> Software licence. > I've been working on a philosophical argument that distinguishes free > technologies from proprietary technologies on a technical basis. This > offers a foundation to argue, along with the PMPC campaign, that > European institutions, and more generally public institutions, should > prefer open technical systems to closed technical systems [...] This is great work, thanks! Looking forward to reading more. I just yesterday finally picked up a copy of "The Comingled Code" by Josh Lerner and Mark Schankerman. The subtitle of the book is "Open Source and Economic Development", so it is not about technical arguments, nor philosophical arguments, nor morals. Ultimately, I believe a successful "Public Infrastructure" campaign needs to also look at economical arguments _against_ Free Software, and carefully dissect and refute these arguments. To illustrate the problem, let me quote from the final section of that book, the "Takeaways": # Implications for Government Officials There is no right answer. Despite the well-understood imperfections of the software market, we find no reason to believe that market mecha- nisms inherently favor either type of software. Under these conditions, and given the serious hazards of governments trying to pick winners, it is appropriate to let competition (controlled, of course, by competi- tion law) and the decentralized choices of diverse economic agents do their jobs. More specifically, government officials need not—and should not—favor either open source or proprietary software. Rather, they should maintain a neutral stance toward the way in which software is licensed, devel- oped, and procured. There are many reasons for encouraging com- petition between open and proprietary software. Open source and proprietary software differ on many dimensions, including such crite- ria as functionality, cost, quality, and product evolution. These con- siderations are each likely to require careful assessment. To consider the last-mentioned criteria, for instance, open source software gives the user access to the underlying software code—thus there is no danger that the software will be ‘‘snatched away’’ because of the change of a corporate strategy. But the development of future versions of open source programs will be a function of its ability to attract the interest of individual and corporate contributors. When encouraging the development of a local computer industry, government officials should let firms weigh these complex considerations and choose the model of software development that they find most appropriate. Rec- ommending that governments should encourage competition, how- ever, is not the same thing as arguing that they should not be involved in regulating the software industry. When funding the development of software, whether for their own use or as a more general R&D effort, government officials need to apply a different calculus as opposed to private entities. In particular, the same issues, such as cost and quality, should be weighted, but government officials must also take into account the benefits to society. This implies that different countries may make different choices. For instance, a small country might want to take advantage of further improvements by others to its software and would be more inclined to fund open source projects with licenses that limit commercial utilization, such as the General Public License. In a large country with a dynamic software industry, government officials may wish to make it easier for commercial firms to benefit from publicly funded research and development. (Indeed our survey findings suggest that countries in the real world do make different choices.) [...] ___ Discussion mailing list Discussion@lists.fsfe.org https://lists.fsfe.org/mailman/listinfo/discussion
